Math reforms add up for Alabama students, parents

Can you multiply 48 times 26 in your head? If you can't, you're not alone, but you might be one day.

Ruth Parker, a Washington-based math teacher and CEO of the Mathematics Education Collaborative, put the problem to parents during a recent seminar at Hewitt-Trussville High School to show there are better ways of doing math than the ones we learned in school.

Parker is a longtime advocate of reforming math education to focus less on rote memorization and traditional "paper and pencil" methods for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing and more on helping children understand the relationships between numbers so they can solve problems logically and creatively.

The philosophy she endorses, sometimes called reform math (or fuzzy math by critics), has gained considerable steam in Alabama in recent years as the Alabama Math, Science and Technology Initiative (AMSTI) and other teacher training programs have exploded in schools across the state.

Teachers in the Birmingham area and around Alabama are relying less on traditional textbook lessons and more on games, activities and manipulatives, objects children can put their hands on to create visual representations of abstract concepts.

Ann Dominick, a math coach in Hoover schools, said the result is the same -- a right answer, but students learn to reach it in a variety of ways.

Take Parker's multiplication problem. You can work it out on paper the traditional way, or you can look for alternatives.

Instead of multiplying 48 times 26, multiply 48 times 100, to get 4,800. If you subtract one from 26, you get 25, which is a quarter of 100. Find a quarter of 4,800, which is 1,200. Since the original number was 26, not 25, add 48 one more time, for a total of 1,248.

Here's another way: Multiply 26 times 50 (which is 48+2) to get 1,300. Then take out the two 26s we added (26+26=52), to get 1,248.

Parker contends that, by plugging numbers into traditional algorithms, children may get a right answer, but they don't understand why, which leaves them open for failure when they get into higher math. By contrast, encouraging discussion, collaboration and fluency with numbers helps create critical thinkers who can solve real-world problems, she said.

Beverly TaylorStudents at Green Valley Elementary, including Josh Reynolds, learn math in a new way that focuses on understanding relationships between numbers and finding a variety of ways to solve a problem.

Dominick said children still need to know multiplication tables, but they need to know a lot more. Math reforms, endorsed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics as early as 1989, build on the kind of thinking children do naturally, she said. "Really, mathematics is the study of logic," she said.

Steve Ricks, the state's AMSTI coordinator, said the United States is facing a shortage of mathematicians and scientists. "You have to ask yourself why," he said. It's difficult to find adults who say they enjoy doing math, he said, and if children learn the same way their parents did, that won't change.

AMSTI, which provides teacher training, classroom materials and support from specialists, rolled out in 2002 to 20 schools. Today, teachers in about 40 percent of Alabama schools have received training.

Ricks said schools are clamoring to get on board. AMSTI schools have outmatched comparable non-AMSTI schools on state tests, often dramatically. University of Alabama evaluators, studying 2007 test data, found that up to 14.5 percent more students at AMSTI schools scored at or above proficiency in math.

The state's goal is to have AMSTI in every K-12 school by 2011, but with funding cuts, that target is uncertain. The state is also piloting a pre-kindergarten AMSTI program.

Some school systems provide similar training, such as the Mobile Math Initiative. which has been used in Mobile, Hoover and Decatur, and the Greater Birmingham Mathematics Partnership, which offers training for teachers in nine Birmingham area school systems.

Jason McLevaine couldn't stand math as a student. Now that he's a teacher, it's his favorite subject. It wasn't McLevaine that changed; it was math. "The algorithms weren't tangible," he recalled of his school-days struggle. "It was like I was using the wrong part of my brain to solve the problems."

McLevaine, a second-grade teacher at Green Valley Elementary in Hoover, trained four years ago with the Mobile Math Initiative and uses chess, card games and other activities in class.

The response from parents has been mostly positive, but not everyone supports such changes, he said. Adults who learned math the traditional way sometimes have a hard time understanding how learning can be going on without a textbook. But "if I send the kids' work home and they're able to explain to their parents what they're doing," then it's clear they are learning, he said.

Beverly TaylorMaggie Kahn works on a math problem.

Although this is a powerful style of teaching, McLevaine said, it requires assessments to validate the teaching and a lot of communication with parents. He talks about math with parents in parent-teacher conferences, and the school has "math nights" for parents and students.

Family math nights are becoming more common in the Birmingham area as educators are faced with teaching math not only to students, but to their parents as well. Nearly 200 people showed up for Parker's recent 2½-hour lesson at Hewitt-Trussville High. Other recent sessions in Trussville and Fairfield drew nearly 300, organizers said.

Trussville mom Debbie Stotser said she has attended math nights, and it's helped her think differently about how she adds and subtracts. "Every time I go I learn something," she said. "I think adults need this as much as kids."